MYCallsign – the Malaysian Amateur Radio Callsign Query Mobile Application has been updated, now it comes with a new spiffy logo. The mobile application can be installed on most Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, Motorola and Samsung phones. The application can be used to display information regarding an amateur radio callsign, such as handle (fullname), apparatus assignment (AA) and AA expiry date, and it is handy for recording QSO information in the logbook.

The application is licensed under the GNU General Public License 2.0 and is available for download at MYCallsign GoogleCode website

A day before Hari Raya Aidifitri 1431, I receive a message from a fellow amateur radio operator in my Yahoo Messenger client (I use Pidgin). The message was seemingly genuine from him asking if I’m receiving his message, after answering his questions, he proceeds to ask me to wait for a moment ask he wants me to try something. It turns out that he asks me to visit an online quiz website.

The exchange seems almost fluid and being done by a human being, except that my friend and I never had conversation in English! This seems all too fishy when he didn’t response to my conclusion that his computer is infected by a malware/virus. Here are the screenshot of the exchange, (warning: the transcripts contain expletives)

Beware, these kind of viruses can compromise the security of your computer and may be used to harvest your password and other personal information for criminal intent. A seemingly innocent Online Quiz website may be used by phishers in order to commit fraudulent activity.

Verify whether it is really your friend is communicating with you and not somebody else or a program pretending to be him/her, and most importantly do not fell victim to Yahoo Messenger viruses, the result can be devastating.

Good news for First-Person-Shooter (FPS) lovers! Urban Terror might be just for you! Build upon Quake III Arena open source code, Urban Terror features game-play that is almost similar with Counter-strike, except better graphics and is updated to meet the needs of today’s computer graphic hardware demands. Best of all, the game is free!

You can download Urban Terror from its official website and start fraggin’ now!

Windows users who are going to format their computer need not to worry about searching for hardware drivers anymore with DriverBackup! utility.

An easy to use utility, DriverBackup! searches for your hardware drivers in your windows operating system and let you select which of the drivers that you wished to archive, in order to be use later in new Windows installations.

Why DriversBackup!? because it is a pain in the ass to search for free hardware drivers,

Here’s a video to my favorite game during my high-school days. It reach Malaysia in 1993-1994. The name of the game is UFO Defense: Enemy Unknown, published by Microprose.

It is a turn-based game, but unlike any typical turn-base game it includes elements of real-time action

The premise of this game is the aliens are invading Earth, and it is up to X-COM, an elite black-ops organization funded by UN to protect the planet from the Alien terror. The alien uses advance weaponry and genetic engineering to achieve their goals, while the humans with organized efforts from several countries would attempt to stop the invaders from succeeding in their plans.

I was searching for some information when I encountered these warning from Google. Apparently our SIRIM website security has been compromised and was spreading malwares to viewers around the world. Upon closer inspection, SIRIM seems to have taken down its website as of May 30,2008.

Probably SIRIM should perform a thorough checking on its website before publishing it to the internet, there must be a “Standard” for website security I assume?

Eager to practice your CW skills but you have nobody to practice with? In some countries like Malaysia, CW knowledge and proficiency is still required to operated HF portion (except 10 meter) of the Amateur Radio band.

Having said that, I’d like to present CWirc, an XChat irc client plugin which enables you to send and receive morse code through IRC. Developed by a fellow ham F8EJF, CWIrc has a lot of features which really enhance your CW experience on the internet, including the option of hooking up a real CW keyer using serial port interface.

CWIrc enables you to exchange morse code with fellow irc users on the internet, provided that the other users also knows morse code and has installed CWIrc. Though this might sound a little bit of a stretch when thinking the odds of meeting people with both requirements, it is actually not so in reality. You can find those kind of people exactly in #cwirc on irc.freenode.net server who are eager to chat with you in CW.

I promise to include a Youtube video demonstrating its sound and operation. Next, I need to get a decent casing and some cheap morse keyer to go with this oscillator. I might be planning to make one that could interface with CWirc too.

I finally had the time to upgrade Please Name My blog to WordPress 2.5 today (or rather tonight). I noticed the blog runs much faster and smoother with the latest release of WordPress, though I hope they would fix the upload file script which I find it a bit buggy for my use.

If you running WordPress, then I suggest you upgrade your WordPress installation the latest release as there are many bugfix and features in this release. Not to mention about the potential security issues when running older WordPress installation.